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Joe Wilkinson College
Not too long after, Daddy got the job as police chief in Borger, Texas. I went to Borger schools from the seventh grade through high school, from whence I graduated in 1959. I went one year to Frank Phillips Junior College, named for the owner of Phillips Petroleum Company, which owned two oil refineries and numerous service stations. Local legend has it that Frank Phillips offered a “large donation” if the administration would name the college after him. They did so, and Phillips donated a large picture of himself to the administration. It was still hanging there when I was there. I have serious doubts about the accuracy of this legend. After one winter at the college, cutting doughnuts every time it snowed, I transferred to Baylor U in Waco for the fall semester, 1960. I lived in Brooks Hall, the oldest dorm where poor students lived. My only significant prank at Brooks was smearing carbon black over the earpiece on the conveniently black phone, then calling my roommate on a different phone. He looked like a raccoon,s but I didn’t tell him. I let him go to class looking like that. After four uneventful years at Baylor, I was studying for my final final exam, when a serious commotion broke out at one of the girl’s dorms. There was a panty raid going on, the first (and last) in the history of Baylor. After the raid, we were driving past the girl’s dorm and my dumbass freshman roommate yelled out the window “hey Marilyn, throw me some panties”. The Baylor cop car, which was parked across the street lit up like a christmas tree and pulled us over. We had a partial 12 pack of Miller Hilife in the back seat, so we all got hauled to the Dean of Men’s office. The dean, redfaced and pissed, said “you boys are in a heap of trouble” and he kicked me and my senior roommate out of school for a semester. It didn’t matter to either of us, because my roomie was headed for medical school, and my psych department sent me to New Mexico to do a one-semester internship at the chimp lab. But it mattered to my mom, because she had bought a new dress for my graduation, which I missed because of my suspension. To this day, I am pissed at Baylor for their overreaction. The internship was at Holloman Air Force Base 6571st Aeromedical Research Laboratory, aka “chimp college”. I had two experiments to perform (on chimps). The first was a test of chimp hearing, using six chimps. The task was discrete-trial avoidance, using (I think) the method of limits. We had one chimp who could hear 35,000 Hz (Hz is short for Hertz, which means “cycles per second”), which is nearly twice the human upper limit (approx. 20,000 Hz). One chimp, whose name I don’t remember, had very sensitive hearing. She would freak out if a sudden loud noise occurred. One day, the airman doing her captivity in the chair, dropped the large wrench used to tighten the neck yoke. The chimp freaked out and went screaming out the door, grabbing a handful of chimp George’s snap leads on the way, totally disabling George’s task. Sergeant Chisolm, who programmed the ancient relay-based equipment we used, took one look at the board, shook his head, and proceeded to pull out the rest of the snap leads and start all over, programming George’s task. George’s task was counting. His interface was two levers and a numerical display. The program consisted of a random number lighting the display. Geor,,ge hit the count lever that many times, then hit the “I’m through” lever. If he hit the count lever the correct number of times, he got a food pellet. Otherwise, he got a loud buzz. The food pellets came in four flavors, banana, raspberry, coconut, and maple-walnut. If his pellet was banana, he put the pellet in the banana pile, if raspberry in the raspberry pile, if coconut, into that pile. But it was maple walnut, he let out a scream and threw the pellet in his refuse tray. When a VIP came to watch, George would quit working, sit down by his stash, and start eating them. He wouldn’t work again until he finished his stash. One time an airman decided to take his stash. He nearly lost his arm, with George screaming and trying to amputate the airman’s arm. The airman pulled out his arm without injury, and was the last time anyone attempted that trick. In October, 1963, Dan Rather came to the lab to shoot a piece for CBS News. After finishing his piece, he decided to use George’s task as the backdrop. The first take, George was behind Rather. About halfway through Rather’s spiel, George stepped to the side and started pissing on the plexiglass wall that constituted his cage wall. Next try, George shat in his hand and smeared it all over. About the fifth try, George behaved, and Rather got his closing spiel. He then flew off to San Antonio to cover an explosion. A month later on November 22, 1963, Rather became famous, as he scooped the Kennedy assassination. The other experiment I worked on involved a single chimp, Clayton, working on Sidman avoidance. Sidman interface is a single lever, nothing else. The animal has to hit the lever more often than once every 5 seconds, or he gets shocked. Usually, at the beginning, the animal hits the lever about twice per second, to avoid shock. After much experience completed, his response rate will slow to about one every four seconds or so. Clayton and I bonded, and he would hand me the neck yoke when we worked. One time, I left the lab for a week-long trip back to Baylor, but I had to go back to the lab for something. About half a dozen airmen were attempting to seat Clayton, who was in the upper corner of the room, daring anyone to mess with him. I said (something like) “Clayton, get your ass in the chair”. He immediately left his perch, got in his chair, and handed me his neck yoke. I then left the lab. Onward and upward. Having completed my internship, I returned to Baylor as a first-year graduate student. I won’t bore you with the details of my course work, but my research was a bit more interesting. During my first semester the psych department won a contract with Brooks AFB in San Antonio, TX. I moved down there, as the project was in trouble. I took over the project, which meant that the existing leader was fired, which pissed him off royally. He blamed me for his misfortune, but it was his incompetence which caused his misfortune. Lt. Don Barnes was the project manager, and we became lifelong friends. Anyway, I put together a solution involving some huge plywood boxes, slide projectors, and the necessary programming equipment (which I built). These, along with the appropriate slides, allowed for a successful completion of the project. I then moved back to Baylor, bringing with me another research project, involving rhesus monkeys and baboons (papio papio, if you’re interested). Why baboons? For years, medical research, including the radiation research we were doing, used only rhesus monkeys. For our research, we were supposed to estimate the radiation effects of human pilots using the radiation response of rhesus monkeys. I thought that using only rhesus monkeys was questionable, at best. So I proposed using multiple species. Practical considerations led me to use baboons, which are closely related to rhesus monkeys (both are old world monkeys). Our results indicated that, in fact, monkeys and baboons behaved quite differently post radiation. After a few years of this research, we had definitive proof of this difference. We met with John Pickering, head of the department, to discuss our results, and he said, “we need to do research that answers questions, not raising questions” and refused our request for further funding, leaving me without a job. The psych department found me a research position at the Bell County Mental Retardation Center, which kept me afloat for a while, until I finished my PhD. The process of getting my degree took about ten years, way longer than the norm. Professors used to joke that maybe I could get tenure as a graduate student.